Hunger for rice gives sellers the upper hand
For the past 40 years, consumers have had the upper-hand in the global rice market, which has witnessed a steady decline in prices, interrupted only by the brief spike in 1973-74 triggered by the first oil crisis. The structural decline in prices was the result of the Green Revolution, the agronomics movement that spread the use of irrigation, fertiliser and high-yielding varieties of rice in Asia in the late 1960s and led to bumper crops.